All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It's Thursday, and that means it's time for the Public Eye Chat. This week's subject is CBS News’ “The Early Show” Weather Anchor and Feature Reporter Dave Price.

Matthew Felling: Key West, Aspen, Outer Banks, Savannah … what’s the summer been like, aside from adjusting your watch every two days?

Dave Price: That’s the fun of doing what we get to do. We get to tour around the country and visit great places. We get to meet the people who watch the show or meet people who haven’t. It’s like being an ambassador for “The Early Show.”

Matthew Felling:When it comes to TV news, the morning shows have a different relationship with their viewers, more intimate. Do you see that?

Dave Price: It’s absolutely more intimate. When you’re doing morning TV, you’re with your audience as they’re getting ready to start their day. You’re having breakfast with the people. You have the opportunity to develop more of a relationship with them because they’re often watching for a longer period of time. We’re not doing a half-hour broadcast. We’re not only doing hard news. And we have the ability to build a long-term relationship. Every day we start our days together.

Matthew Felling: Were you a night owl in a prior life?

Dave Price: It’s funny. I grew up a night owl. Always woke up late. Never got to class on time in college. But since I’ve been doing morning news for 11 or 12 years, I’ve grown to love the morning. The earlier, the better. And to be honest with you, I’d much rather do a program that operates with a little more flexibility than a traditional evening broadcast.

Matthew Felling: You and I probably have different definitions of the word ‘morning.’ How early do you have to get up?

Dave Price: There’s no normal time, because when I’m in New York it’s one time, when I’m in Central or Mountain or Pacific it’s something else. It varies because of where we broadcast from, and it also varies due to circumstance. Am I in a blizzard somewhere on the side of a road? Am I in Cancun in the middle of a hurricane?

This week, we were in Cancun. The broadcast morning started at three in the morning. We were out in the streets, making sure our broadcast was set technically and passing along up-to-the-minute information; broadcasting through the day for CBS News television; providing news updates for local affiliates; providing radio reports for CBS network radio; doing specialized reports for CBS stations across the country in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Then at nightfall, I was on the radio all night with Sky News in Great Britain and CBS Up To The Minute up through the night and then the CBS Morning News until we went on the air again with “The Early Show.”

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Now that we’re smack-dab in the middle of hurricane season and working our way toward the one-year anniversary of Katrina, we’re sure to hear a lot more about how much stronger and more destructive these storms are today than in the past. Is it global warming that’s causing this trend of monster storms? Or could it be it’s not the hurricanes that have gotten more powerful, it’s the tools we use to measure them? That’s what a new study suggests, covered here at Florida Today:

Studies that link a spike in hurricane intensity with global warming are spotting "artificial upward trends" because they rely on bad historical data, a paper suggested today in the journal Science.

Hurricane intensity is measured by the storms' surface winds. Sometimes those winds are estimated by looking at satellite pictures, using a subjective technique invented in 1972.

Better technology since then, including greater satellite coverage, has led inevitably to higher wind-speed estimates for more recent storms, the authors suggest.

Just some food for thought.

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It seems that we weren't the only ones with a few criticisms of television news coverage of Hurricane Wilma. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush mentioned this morning during a news conference that he was none too pleased with the "bad example" television reporters set for residents. The Palm Beach Post writes:

Bush said he was "annoyed" by television reporters broadcasting during the storm, accusing them of setting a "bad example" for others. … "My wife and I woke up at five this morning just like everybody else does to watch the storm. And we see these characters on television reporting the news and putting themselves in harm's way. That doesn't do much good either, creates a bad example for others. It isn't fun. It's very dangerous," he said.

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Following Hurricane Katrina, there was a lot of talk about television reporters becoming part of the stories they cover -- expressing too much emotion, editorializing, intervening. After watching this morning’s coverage of Hurricane Wilma, television reporters seemed to be returning to more familiar roles in the hurricane story: potential victims.



On CBS’s “The Early Show,” Trish Regan reported from Key Largo, Florida, where it appeared quite likely that she might be picked up and promptly deposited in the raging sea behind her by the “hurricane-force winds and sideways rain” that she described as she stood near the edge of a pier. She struggled to remain upright, and the satellite feed struggled to catch all of her words as she spoke with anchor, Rene Syler.



“You can see for yourself, Hurricane Wilma has arrived … I’m being hit by hurricane force winds and sideways rain,” Regan shouted.



At around 8:30, ABC’s “Good Morning America” had Bob Woodruff reporting live, also struggling to stand upright, from what appeared to be the right lane of a highway in Naples, Florida.


“Robin, this is the real deal right now. We're really getting slammed. We've got gusts of over 50 miles per hour,” said Woodruff.



Just as I began to wonder when the roof of a building would fly off and hit Woodruff in the head, he filled me in. “Just about five minutes ago, the roof of this center completely ripped off,” said Woodruff, as the camera panned to a now roof-defunct building. I was less intrigued by the fact that the wind was strong enough to tear a roof from a building than I was relieved that Woodruff was not impaled by flying debris.

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We received this e-mail recently from Jon A., about a recent report from correspondent Elizabeth Kaledin, which was the "Inside Story" on the "Evening News" Sept. 23. You can watch the report here:












Here is what Jon A. had to say about it:

"Elizabeth Kaledin did a story on the connection between global warming and recent hurricanes. She quoted two experts who said essentially there is no detectable connection and attributed the hurricanes to a normal cycle of ocean warming. What she failed to do is present the other side of the argument. Two recent studies in major scientific publications (off-hand I believe one was an MIT led study and another I think was British) argued that there was a connection. One study in particular said that the effect of warming was primarily on the severity and not the number of hurricanes. I could accuse CBS of right wing media bias and supporting those who downplay warming. I'd probably be off-base. I'll attribute Kaledin's report more to her failure to Google and contact reputable environmental groups in researching her piece - just as I have failed to give you the cites!"

Kaledin and "Evening News" producers Kevin Finnegan and Susan Schackman respond:

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“Elizabeth Kaledin did a story on the connection between global warming and recent hurricanes. She quoted two experts who said essentially there is no detectable connection and attributed the hurricanes to a normal cycle of ocean warming. What she failed to do is present the other side of the argument. Two recent studies in major scientific publications (off-hand I believe one was an MIT led study and another I think was British) argued that there was a connection. One study in particular said that the effect of warming was primarily on the severity and not the number of hurricanes. I could accuse CBS of right wing media bias and supporting those who downplay warming. I'd probably be off-base. I'll attribute Kaledin's report more to her failure to Google and contact reputable environmental groups in researching her piece - just as I have failed to give you the cites!”

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John Cooper is a freelance cameraman who has been working as one of the “roving cameramen” for Newspath, CBS’s news service that provides material for the network’s affiliates across the country. He has been in New Orleans for two weeks, traveling around the city with a producer and a correspondent, seeking stories and filing daily for CBS affiliates.



Cooper has been with CBS News for about 10 years and has been in the news business for 20, covering many hurricanes throughout that time. He has traveled the world working on various documentaries, and most recently, he traveled with CBS News to Iraq to cover the war and to the Georgian Republic to cover President Bush’s visit to the region.



As Hurricane Rita approaches the Gulf Coast, Cooper remains in the area and isn’t yet sure when he’ll return home. On Wednesday, as the city continued to recover and prepare for Rita, he shared his impressions of New Orleans in recent days — from a brutally honest and unique perspective:

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Earlier this week, Public Eye looked at the fine line broadcast journalists walk when covering stories that could be dangerous to the public -- like hurricanes. When does news coverage go over the line and become hype, alarmist or crass ratings plays? When does lack of coverage become a disservice? Over the years, for example, CBS News, along with the other networks, has occasionally been accused of overkill in covering storms that eventually petered out.



In that light, an e-mail that Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN/US sent to several staffers about the graphics to be used during coverage of Hurricane Rita may be of interest.
Klein wrote:

The term CATEGORY 4=viewership. (Everbody knows the cateogires [sic] after Katrina)



We need to put it on the screen all the time (in addition to radar).



Before it becomes cat 4. PREDICTION: RITA CATEGORY 4.



Could replace the generic "Hurricane Rita" lower-third banner. Or better still we could flash the status top left where we put "New Video" in the same large font.



Mike, can your guys design something arresting? Wil and David, pls figure out something for tonight in the meantime.

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How do you prepare to cover a hurricane like Rita? No one's sure where it's going to hit land, how strong it'll be, or where it's going to do the most damage. You don't want to have your news crew stuck in, say, Dallas, when the big story is in Galveston. So what do you do? According to CBS National Editor Bill Felling, you position teams to the north, east and west of where you think the storm will hit – and make sure they're ready to slide up and down the coast at a moment's notice.



"Last night it looked like it was jogging south, so I was getting ready to send a team to Corpus Christi," says Felling. "But this morning it went back north," so he kept the team in Houston, along with a helicopter. When a major storm like Rita is approaching, Felling stays glued to the National Hurricane Center website, which constantly updates the storm's position, and moves his three teams accordingly.



There's a kind of hierarchy of coverage when it comes to hurricanes. Ideally, a network wants to provide high quality video of a correspondent reporting from the storm. Barring that, grainy video phone coverage will do. A level below video phone coverage is a correspondent reporting via a plain old telephone – essentially, radio-type coverage on TV. And last is a network being unable to broadcast.

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